Israel Matzav

It's all one war and the enemy is Iran

On October 4, 2001, just three and a half weeks after 9/11, then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon got into what may have been his only spat with George W. Bush. In a news conference after yet another Palestinian terror attack, Sharon compared Israel's position just after 9/11 with that of Czechoslovakia on the eve of World War II:

"The enlightened democracies of Europe decided then to sacrifice Czechoslovakia in favor of a convenient temporary solution" to the demands of Germany's Adolf Hitler, Sharon said. "We will be unable to accept that. Israel will not be Czechoslovakia. Israel will fight terrorism."

"Do not try to appease the Arabs at our expense," Sharon said.

The Bush administration rejected Sharon's criticism:

"The prime minister's comments are unacceptable," [then White House spokesman Ari] Fleischer said. "Israel has no stronger friend and ally in the world than the United States. President Bush is an especially close friend of Israel."

He added: "The United States has been working for months to press the parties to end the violence and return to a political dialogue. The United States will continue to press both Israel and the Palestinians to move forward."

Earlier this week, an unidentified administration official leaked to the news media that Bush's security team was working on a plan for a Palestinian state and that it would keep pushing its own proposals.

In the meantime, under prodding by Secretary of State Colin Powell, Israel and the Palestinian Authority resumed security talks without waiting for a period free of terrorist attacks, as demanded by Sharon.

Fleischer responded, "The United States is not doing anything to try to appease the Arabs at Israel's expense."

The Bush administration has tried to get Arab countries to support its counterterrorism campaign against the al-Qaida terrorist network in Afghanistan.

What Sharon was really trying to say - other than that Israel was not going to be a sacrificial lamb for the war on terror - was that Israel is fighting the same people that attacked the United States on 9/11 and for the same reasons. Sharon was saying that Israel has been fighting the war on terror since long before the United States ever heard of it.

This week, with Israel at war against two Iranian proxies in Gaza and Lebanon, and with the United States at war with another Iranian proxy in Iraq, maybe the world (or at least the United States) is starting to get it. Granted that Michael Ledeen and Jeff Jacoby are both guys who probably got it in the first place. But the fact that they are taking center stage and instead of just defending Israel, they are reminding the American people that Israel is "with us" and Iran (both by itself and through its proxies) is "against us" in President Bush's terms, and that this is all one war, cannot help but increase support for Israel in the United States.

I'm going to give you a sample of each article, but they are really both required reading (and I mean the entire article).

Ledeen:

No one should have any lingering doubts about what’s going on in the Middle East. It’s war, and it now runs from Gaza into Israel, through Lebanon and thence to Iraq via Syria. There are different instruments, ranging from Hamas in Gaza to Hezbollah in Syria and Lebanon and on to the multifaceted “insurgency” in Iraq. But there is a common prime mover, and that is the Iranian mullahcracy, the revolutionary Islamic fascist state that declared war on us 27 years ago and has yet to be held accountable.

It is very good news that the White House immediately denounced Iran and Syria, just as Ambassador Khalilzad had yesterday tagged the terrorist Siamese twins as sponsors of terrorism in Iraq. For those who doubt the Iranian hand, remind yourself that Hezbollah is a wholly owned subsidiary of the mullahcracy (with Syria providing some supplies, and free run of the territory), and then read what Iraq the Model had to say yesterday, Wednesday:

Hizbollah is Iran's and Syria's partner in feeding instability in Iraq as there were evidence that this terror group has a role in equipping and training insurgents in Iraq and Hizbollah had more than once openly showed support for the “resistance” in Iraq and sponsored the meetings of Baathist and radical Islamist militants who are responsible for most of the violence in Iraq.

Notice, please, that he says Iran “sponsored the meetings of Baathist and radical Islamist militants...” He is talking Sunnis here, the same Sunnis who, according to CIA deep thinkers and scads of academic experts, cannot possibly work closely with Shiites like, ahem, the mullahs of Tehran. Iraq the Model isn’t burdened by this wisdom, and so he just reports what he sees on the ground in his own country.

Notice also that over the weekend there was a “security summit” in Tehran, involving all of Iraq’s neighbors, at which Iran’s moonbat President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made one of his trademark understatements about Israel. “The existence of this regime will bring nothing but suffering and misery for people in the region,” he mildly commented, and then said that the anger of the people might soon “lead to a vast explosion that will know no boundaries.”

...

The only way we are going to win this war is to bring down those regimes in Tehran and Damascus, and they are not going to fall as a result of fighting between their terrorist proxies in Gaza and Lebanon on the one hand, and Israel on the other. Only the United States can accomplish it.

Jacoby:

Was it just a coincidence that Ahmadinejad's prediction of ``a huge explosion" came only days before Hezbollah's assault across the border and its unprecedented attack on Haifa? Or did the rabid president of the evil regime that bankrolls Hezbollah with an estimated $200 million a year know what was coming? It was Iran that supplied Hezbollah with its immense arsenal of artillery rockets. When Hezbollah launches them at Israel, it is doing the bidding of its patron.

The same is true of Hamas, which is also financed by Iran. The top Hamas mastermind held a press conference in a Damascus ballroom last week, where he extolled the Syrian regime that shelters him. Syria is in turn protected by Iran, with which it signed a military cooperation pact in June. So it came as no surprise when Ahmadinejad warned Israel not to extend its military offensive to Syria, and threatened ``a crushing response" if it did.

Israel has to repair its deterrent threat, which was weakened by the unilateral retreats from Gaza and southern Lebanon and by too many listless responses to terrorist provocations. A sustained assault into southern Lebanon, one that leaves Hezbollah in shards and Israel's northern border at peace, would be welcome evidence that the old Israel is back. And it would represent a significant victory in the worldwide war against Islamist terrorism.

Gaza, Hezbollah, Iraq, Al Qaeda: It is all the same fight. ``No one should have any lingering doubts about what's going on in the Middle East," writes Michael Ledeen, an expert on terrorism and Iran. ``It's war, and it now runs from Gaza into Israel, through Lebanon and thence to Iraq via Syria. There are different instruments, ranging from Hamas in Gaza to Hezbollah in Syria and Lebanon and on to the multifaceted `insurgency' in Iraq. But there is a common prime mover, and that is the Iranian mullahcracy, the revolutionary Islamic fascist state that declared war on us 27 years ago and has yet to be held accountable."

Twenty-seven years ago was 1979, the year that Islamist radicals loyal to the Ayatollah Khomeini invaded the US embassy in Tehran and held dozens of American diplomats hostage for the next 444 days. Washington's response was weak and feckless, as it would be time and again in the years that followed. Only after 9/11 did the United States finally acknowledge that it was in a war with militant Islam and began fighting back in earnest. But not against Iran, which continues, unscathed and unrepentant, to stoke the terrorist fires. Its goals, unchanged since Khomeini's day, are to become the dominant power in the Middle East, to create Islamist regimes worldwide, to annihilate Israel, and to kill Americans.

Read both articles entirely.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 2:54 PM